Lightroom: Importing 100 Thousand Photos — My Summary

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 22. November 2011 - 7:21

After a few major crashes, I decided to start from scratch, almost (I had saved all of my XMPs.) I created a new catalog and imported 93,259 photos. I was able to import all of them in less than 5 days!

Here's my summary for the:

  1. Use some other software like IrFanview to eliminate the photos that are out of focus, the photos where the Eiffel Tower sticks out of the head, or… The least amount of photos to import, the faster the import will be.
  2. Move the photos into the proper directories before importing them into Lightroom. Lightroom doesn't use Windows or OSx to copy, it creates its own, and it's very slow.
  3. Use the Add to import.
  4. Stay away from Copy as DNG, it's a very slow operation. I have changed from be a user/proponent of DNG to a virulent opponent of DNG.
  5. Render the preview as minimal. Do you really need the 1:1 previews? Do you have the disk space available to store 100 thousand 1:1 previews1? Will you actually review the 100 thousand photos2? You can always generate the previews later, at your own leisure.
  6. It's much faster to do select all the Previous Import photos and do a Ctrl/Cmd S to save the XMP sidecars than have Lightroom do it automatically when importing a large amount of photos.
  • Nowhere do I mention, get more memory. My 100 thousand photos catalog is around 1.7 Gigabytes. Windows plus Lightroom's memory usage hovers around 2.5Gb of RAM.
  • Having a CPU with multi-core will not speed any of the operations. Having a fast CPU with a high clock speed will improve the situation somewhat.
  • On Windows running a regular Disk Defrag will help with the previews. On OSx, officially, it's not a problem according to Apple, but it is.

  1. 1.3 terabytes of photos would mean between 1.5 to 2.5 terabytes of disk space for the 1:1 previews for 100 thousand photos. ↩

  2. Years ago, in the 1980s, I was asked to write a report for the Monday morning management meeting. The guy wanted a list of all the transactions for the week. I tried to explain to him that it would be too much. He insisted, I was paid by the hour, so I wrote 2 reports, the first report was a detailed report with each transaction, the second report was a 2 page summary by product line. I printed both, the detailed report was almost 400 pages long, the product line report was a tight single page (small fonts.) I asked him to check-mark each page of the detailed report. Only then, did he realize and agreed that the product line report was a better decision tool. ↩